[This would make some more sense with context, and that applies to a lot of the rest of the story. There’s zero establishing of characters or setting, just some dialog that doesn’t really define who or what. It looks like it MIGHT make sense if we had a clue as to the people speaking them and under what circumstances, but the strongest indicator there is ‘in the wreckage’ earlier, which doesn’t really tell us anything enough to build a mental image. There’s implication of the characters being underground, but whether they’re in a common traffic tunnel that collapsed or a smuggling tunnel that’s been sealed is both equally plausible due to lacking setting]

Are they actually going to bother trying to find us? I mean, the world is going to pretty much be smashed into little tiny bits in like forty-four hours."

[This implies a few things: one that there is a world-changing event in-progress, and the other is that the characters involved are somehow involved in it, but there is no timely elaboration on the who, what, how, or why]

"Yeah, but the mammals survived."

"That's because back then we were about hamster-sized.

[Incorrect: the mass animal extinction was not due to size (only animals in the immediate crater zone died quickly), the deaths were due to temperature and chemical changes in the atmosphere causing mass-deaths along the food chain – fossil records show enough of a space between the chemical/isotope residual from the extinction trigger and the population change that it was likely decades before the real animal demographics started to change. Of course, that’s still under speculation because the difference in plant deaths and animals are off by thousands of years, and paleontologists have never explained that curious mis-alignment of extinctions]

"We could eat my legs."

"What?"

"Hey, not like they'll be any use for me."

[This is the first clear indicator that somebody’s injured. Prior indication was so unclear, the characters might have just not had anywhere to go, such as being stuck in a car]

"To deny our impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human."

[Besides the fact that the line Mouse makes is mis-quoted badly out of context, science and philosophy settled that question thousands of years ago: as animals do not appear to act against their base instincts and only humans do, THAT fact makes us human]

Not even like the atomic bomb or whatever?"

"Okay. Say we didn't drop them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[Actually, the americans were not the first to develop atomic weapons: just deploy them. The Nazis’ mismanagement and Army Ordinance Office’s pressure from Hitler to create other super-weapons led to lack of direction in the project. Japan also detonated a test warhead in occupied Korea (Konan), though that information was even more intentionally buried than the biological experiments in Ping Fan and I have yet to read Robert Wilcox’s book on the Japanese atomic bomb project. Oh, and Franklin Roosevelt was vehemently opposed to the use of the atomic bomb until he saw the estimated casualties for both sides: a couple million american soldiers, doubled to include allied nation personnel, then between 60-90 percent of Japanese military and well over 10 million civilians. It amuses me when people think that the nuclear bombs were “horrible weapons” when pretty much any of the firebombings over Tokyo or the other cities killed more people in one run than the total deaths (including radiation poisoning decades later) of both bombs combined]

Two, it's an eleven-and-a-half minute song

[a REAL challenge would be “Hardware Store”, which lacks the easy breathing pace]

The story’s got a complete lack of non-dialog information and this lack of context or any form of backing hurts the story. It’s not until more than halfway through that we suddenly get “an asteroid’s going to blow up the earth”, and it seems to be there to artificially inflate the tension of the scene. I think that two characters in a collapsed tunnel would’ve been a lot better because it keeps things more focused on them. In a real sense, the outside world doesn’t matter, because they’re trapped, running out of air and food/water, and THEIR world is about to end. That stuff outside is really more distracting than anything else, and the fact that the story keeps on circling around THEIR plight seems to reinforce this.

Thanks for the review to Isle of Dreams: Awakening, I’ve started revamping the story and would like to see your opinion.